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Jon Rynn's blog

The wealth of our nation has always been based on manufacturing. A country that has no manufacturing is not post-industrial, it is pre-industrial, that is, poor. The people of the United States are perfectly capable of rebuilding the manufacturing sector by concentrating on high-skill sectors such as industrial machinery and digital technology, among others. For most of our history, these statements would have been been greeted with a shrug, as if the speaker was stating the obvious.

Recently we have been warned that the global emissions of greenhouse gases, continued unabated, will result in more extreme climate events, until finally global warming will run out of control with gruesome consequences. We can’t afford to wait. Michael Mann urges scientists to speak out. Most environmental organizations call for some kind of carbon taxes, or cap-and-trade schemes. Some even advocate the construction of nuclear power plants. We are called on to have the kind of urgency we had when we won World War II, or at least, to have the fierce urgency of now.

And yet the one thing no one seems to be calling for is the one set of policies that could actually solve the problem — a nationally, government-planned reconstruction of the energy, transportation, urban and agricultural infrastructure that would result in zero emissions.

The following was published in the Costco Connection, a magazine that, according the editor, "is mailed to over 8 million businesses and their employees and family members across the country and is read by close to 20 million people."

We use manufactured goods for almost everything we do. Factories, in turn, need the workers who use their skill to operate the machinery that creates the goods. If we want economic growth, we need more manufacturing jobs.

Both Democrats and environmentalists seem to be searching for new sources of support, according to articles from Thomas Edsall and Leslie Kaufman. For Democrats, the problem is the state of mind of the “white working class,” while for environmentalists the problem is to convince the public that something should be done about climate change.

The news from the world of global warming science is grim. We need to keep the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees centigrade or the climate could become extremely dangerous. To stay below that level would require a drastic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years.

Occupy Wall Street has put a spotlight on the vast and growing economic inequality in the United States. It now takes its place as a top progressive priority — perhaps the highest priority it has experienced since the Great Depression.

The looming global warming catastrophe could be worse, in the long term, than any war, social collapse, or single famine in human history. We need to scale up renewable technologies as quickly as possible — by any means necessary. And that is exactly what the Chinese are doing. According to Steven Lacey at Climate Progress, while world solar cell manufacturing capacity was only 100 MW in 2000, it is now 50,000 MW –- and China by itself accounts for 57 percent.

Recently, a crop of articles has appeared that argue that “our economy will thrive only when we make what we invent,” as Susan Hockstein, President of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, recently concluded in a New York Times op-ed. Hockstein is challenging the idea that the United States can somehow be a world-class source of innovation without actually producing the new products.

Between 1962 and 2009, the cumulative trade deficit of the United States almost exactly equaled the cumulative Federal budget deficit: 7,426 billion for the budget deficit, a couple of billion less for the trade deficit. That is, when you add up all the deficit numbers for those 28 years, both the trade deficits and the budget deficits have generated the same amount of red ink. The Republican House members, in particular, use fear-mongering to convince the public that the federal budget deficit is going to destroy the economy. But what about the trade deficit?

The current conventional wisdom for many in the U.S. is that the less government is involved with the economy the better. But this is precisely the moment in history when more government is needed. Without government intervention, the recovery will continue to stagnate, the economy as a whole will remain off balance, and we won’t be able to meet the challenges facing the country.

Underlying most debates about economic policy lurks a single question: what causes economic growth? This question is key when an economy is stagnating or declining. The answer decides the fates of Presidents, political parties, and whole nations.

Egypt, which was once the breadbasket for the Roman Empire, is now one of a growing number of food basket cases. A thriving center of trade and industry centuries ago, it is now marked by unemployment and dependence on tourism. Instead of dealing with these mounting problems, the Mubarak regime has swept everything under the rug and skimmed billions from the country. No wonder the population is in revolt.

Electoral victories are sometimes built on hopes and dreams, sometimes on fear and anger, sometimes on both. Over the past 30 years progressives have often resorted to emphasizing fear of the Republicans – completely justified, in my view. President Obama’s 2008 campaign, however, showed that progressives can also win by inspiring hope.